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On Giving up Works Because Authors Are Problematic
Disclaimer: This is a personal reflection, not a prescription for what anyone else should do.
So there's a certain social media storm about certain author's views and to what extent they warrant boycotting or completely "giving up" her works. (I'm not going to spell out the specifics out of regard for the effort to not increase her platform—but you know who I mean.) For the record, I am not in this fandom. For me, giving up her works is like someone who once smelled weed giving up pot [Edit: And that semi-pun was unintended]. But the general discussion of ethical responsibilities has been fraught for me.
I totally get the boycotting idea. I get the value of showing protest by not financially supporting her and not engaging with her works in a way that would increase/maintain her huge platform while she is actively using that platform in a way that hurts others. I do not get the rather common response that someone is going to "give up" her works, i.e. never read them again (even if already owned), never enjoy them, never talk about them with friends, or perhaps even think about them fondly without guilt. I hear comments like, "They're tainted" and "A group of people is more important than a franchise" as if an imaginative world that has been foundational to many people's lives since childhood is just a "product," like a washing machine, and not a piece of their minds. It's fine for people to feel this way; it's just very alien to how my mind works.
To me, my most beloved stories are part of my psyche, myself. They could not be ripped out without doing me massive, traumatic damage. I could stop buying new sequels; I could boycott movies, but eliminate the whole narrative from my mind? That would do tremendous harm to me. With apologies for the hypothetical I'm about to give, Yasuhiro Nightow could kill someone, and I would be horrified but I do not think I would "give up" Trigun. I think my relationship with it would change a lot, but I do not think I would give it up. It's a piece of me. It's not a product; it's a set of thoughts that helped me understand how to be a human being.
Here's a concrete, real-life example, not from my most beloved narratives but from one that was formative to me and I respect: The Mists of Avalon. The author, Marion Zimmer Bradley, was posthumously, and I think credibly, accused by her children of extensive physical, sexual, and psychological abuse. Now, she's dead: she's not currently abusing people or making money, so whether to "cancel" her is a different issue. But as someone who grew up with The Mists of Avalon, I felt it like a sock in the gut to hear about this side of its author.
The Mists of Avalon was my first deep engagement with Arthurian legend. From about the ages of ten to eighteen, it was my formative "fandom," though in that era, that was purely in my own head. Morgaine is actually the ur-mother of the giant crossover 'verse in my head (which I've mentioned occasionally on DW). For about those eight years, she was pretty much the protagonist of all my mental fan ficcing, not the protagonist of each separate plotline but like the series protagonist of an ensemble show, the Adama, if you will.
(Spoilers follow…)
Yet there's something disturbing about The Mists of Avalon--and ten is way too young to read it. It has some pretty brutal views of sex and childbearing, and this strange brutality can perhaps best be encapsulated by the relationship between Morgaine and Vivienne, her aunt and mentor, who tricks her into unknowingly having sex with her brother and coerces her into having her brother's child. This understandably breaks their relationship, and Morgaine flees Avalon, which Vivienne rules at this time, and stays away for years. And then some time later (10-15 years, I forget), Morgaine and Vivienne run into each other at Camelot and more or less fall into each other's arms in joy and relief at being reunited. [Edit: To be clear, I don't think it's bad that they reconcile in the story. I actually always loved that scene. I am just forced to reread it as creepy in light of the sense that Bradley might have been expecting a similar "free pass" from her children in real life.]
Now, my default reading of all this stuff had always been that The Mists of Avalon is a raw look at a tough, late-Roman, early Dark Ages Briton where shit was real: death was close, people didn't have rights, the gods demanded sacrifice. I admired it because it felt plausible, historically well situated. And then I read about Bradley's abuse of her children, and with this sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, I thought, "Oh God, she believed it. She really believed that this shit was okay." She even enacted something like this kind of abuse in her home.
So how do I deal with that as a reader? Do I "give up" The Mists of Avalon? This question is made simpler for me by time. The fact is, even without these revelations, I may never have read the book after age eighteen or so. It's not that it's a YA book or anything (God, no); it's just that I spent about eight formative years processing it, and I processed to the point that I came to the end and probably couldn't go back. So in way, I'd already given it up.
And yet these revelations were a kind of nail in the coffin. I don't think I could read it again. I think it would just squick me. I don't feel a moral responsibility not to read it. It's still on my shelf. I wouldn't mind if my kids read it (at older than ten!). Indeed, even Bradley's son wrote a wonderful letter in essence assuring fans that it was okay to have positively influenced by his mother's work, that our reading was not connected to her abuse. But on a gut level, I don't think I can read it.
And yet I continue to admire it. I continue to think it's one of the very important Arthurian novels and contributes notably to modern Arthuriana. I don't want it banned (literally or by social blacklisting). I want future generations to be able to read it. I still have bits of Avalon in the great crossover 'verse in my mind, even if they're usually tangential these days and Morgaine is very, very old, like scary old, like she'd be dead if it weren't for Avalonian magic. I'm not giving that up either. And I find I can think of that Avalon, the one I created for years in my head, without thinking of Bradley and child abuse, at least now that a few years have gone by. And I don't feel any guilt about that. Again, that's just me. I'm not judging anyone else's personal choices. But I guess I hope the same suspension of judgment can be given to those people in that other fandom who cannot mentally give up a story that is a fundamental part of who they are.
So there's a certain social media storm about certain author's views and to what extent they warrant boycotting or completely "giving up" her works. (I'm not going to spell out the specifics out of regard for the effort to not increase her platform—but you know who I mean.) For the record, I am not in this fandom. For me, giving up her works is like someone who once smelled weed giving up pot [Edit: And that semi-pun was unintended]. But the general discussion of ethical responsibilities has been fraught for me.
I totally get the boycotting idea. I get the value of showing protest by not financially supporting her and not engaging with her works in a way that would increase/maintain her huge platform while she is actively using that platform in a way that hurts others. I do not get the rather common response that someone is going to "give up" her works, i.e. never read them again (even if already owned), never enjoy them, never talk about them with friends, or perhaps even think about them fondly without guilt. I hear comments like, "They're tainted" and "A group of people is more important than a franchise" as if an imaginative world that has been foundational to many people's lives since childhood is just a "product," like a washing machine, and not a piece of their minds. It's fine for people to feel this way; it's just very alien to how my mind works.
To me, my most beloved stories are part of my psyche, myself. They could not be ripped out without doing me massive, traumatic damage. I could stop buying new sequels; I could boycott movies, but eliminate the whole narrative from my mind? That would do tremendous harm to me. With apologies for the hypothetical I'm about to give, Yasuhiro Nightow could kill someone, and I would be horrified but I do not think I would "give up" Trigun. I think my relationship with it would change a lot, but I do not think I would give it up. It's a piece of me. It's not a product; it's a set of thoughts that helped me understand how to be a human being.
Here's a concrete, real-life example, not from my most beloved narratives but from one that was formative to me and I respect: The Mists of Avalon. The author, Marion Zimmer Bradley, was posthumously, and I think credibly, accused by her children of extensive physical, sexual, and psychological abuse. Now, she's dead: she's not currently abusing people or making money, so whether to "cancel" her is a different issue. But as someone who grew up with The Mists of Avalon, I felt it like a sock in the gut to hear about this side of its author.
The Mists of Avalon was my first deep engagement with Arthurian legend. From about the ages of ten to eighteen, it was my formative "fandom," though in that era, that was purely in my own head. Morgaine is actually the ur-mother of the giant crossover 'verse in my head (which I've mentioned occasionally on DW). For about those eight years, she was pretty much the protagonist of all my mental fan ficcing, not the protagonist of each separate plotline but like the series protagonist of an ensemble show, the Adama, if you will.
(Spoilers follow…)
Yet there's something disturbing about The Mists of Avalon--and ten is way too young to read it. It has some pretty brutal views of sex and childbearing, and this strange brutality can perhaps best be encapsulated by the relationship between Morgaine and Vivienne, her aunt and mentor, who tricks her into unknowingly having sex with her brother and coerces her into having her brother's child. This understandably breaks their relationship, and Morgaine flees Avalon, which Vivienne rules at this time, and stays away for years. And then some time later (10-15 years, I forget), Morgaine and Vivienne run into each other at Camelot and more or less fall into each other's arms in joy and relief at being reunited. [Edit: To be clear, I don't think it's bad that they reconcile in the story. I actually always loved that scene. I am just forced to reread it as creepy in light of the sense that Bradley might have been expecting a similar "free pass" from her children in real life.]
Now, my default reading of all this stuff had always been that The Mists of Avalon is a raw look at a tough, late-Roman, early Dark Ages Briton where shit was real: death was close, people didn't have rights, the gods demanded sacrifice. I admired it because it felt plausible, historically well situated. And then I read about Bradley's abuse of her children, and with this sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, I thought, "Oh God, she believed it. She really believed that this shit was okay." She even enacted something like this kind of abuse in her home.
So how do I deal with that as a reader? Do I "give up" The Mists of Avalon? This question is made simpler for me by time. The fact is, even without these revelations, I may never have read the book after age eighteen or so. It's not that it's a YA book or anything (God, no); it's just that I spent about eight formative years processing it, and I processed to the point that I came to the end and probably couldn't go back. So in way, I'd already given it up.
And yet these revelations were a kind of nail in the coffin. I don't think I could read it again. I think it would just squick me. I don't feel a moral responsibility not to read it. It's still on my shelf. I wouldn't mind if my kids read it (at older than ten!). Indeed, even Bradley's son wrote a wonderful letter in essence assuring fans that it was okay to have positively influenced by his mother's work, that our reading was not connected to her abuse. But on a gut level, I don't think I can read it.
And yet I continue to admire it. I continue to think it's one of the very important Arthurian novels and contributes notably to modern Arthuriana. I don't want it banned (literally or by social blacklisting). I want future generations to be able to read it. I still have bits of Avalon in the great crossover 'verse in my mind, even if they're usually tangential these days and Morgaine is very, very old, like scary old, like she'd be dead if it weren't for Avalonian magic. I'm not giving that up either. And I find I can think of that Avalon, the one I created for years in my head, without thinking of Bradley and child abuse, at least now that a few years have gone by. And I don't feel any guilt about that. Again, that's just me. I'm not judging anyone else's personal choices. But I guess I hope the same suspension of judgment can be given to those people in that other fandom who cannot mentally give up a story that is a fundamental part of who they are.
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Anyway, I ramble. Thanks for your comment!
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Same. I mostly just see people sorting their personal delineations of importance and pain.
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In the case of the Harry Potter books I've mostly seen people, including trans people, decide not to buy anything more, but still enjoy the stories and the fandom - it was a gateway fandom for so many people that I think it would be hard to ask that of them.
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